“Deep down, all insecure sluts just want to be loved.”

It’s not the kind of response you’d imagine a bride-to-be would receive after announcing her engagement, but that’s exactly what Jezebel’s Tracie Egan got after she posted about her coming nuptials earlier this month.

“I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to obsess about someone I claim to hate, follow their writing and then going out of my way to try to make them feel bad,” she wrote in her blog this week.

Few people can, though you’d think that with all the stuff that’s constantly going on in this fast-paced place we call the World Wide Web, that most of us would be too busy to waste time being discourteous to other people.

Wrong.

“The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness,” Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times four years ago. “Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented—and often unintentional—degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent’s lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.”

But these aren’t adolescents we’re talking about here. They’re adults and even though the web isn’t as wild as it used to be, we’re still acting without any sense.

My good friend Atherton Bartelby is the one who turned me on to Time Out New York columnist and former Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Allison, who gained celebrity online thanks largely to media blog Gawker, is a central figure in the microcelebrity wave and a frequent target of random reader hatred.

I got to see the metamorphosis happen first-hand and I still don’t know what happened. Atherton absolutely loved her columns up until some point over the summer, when he became cross with her over nothing in particular and started railing about everything she did with the fire of a thousand trolls.

Neither he nor I know Allison personally (she and I exchanged a couple of e-mails in June and I think may have I freaked her out with a rant about love and Stendhal), but she was so often a topic of Atherton’s rants that he and I actually had a fight about her.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked him one day over the phone, following a tirade about how reading about her at some tech event was giving him angina. “Julia is so pop! Andy Warhol is giggling from the other side. I think you’re jealous.”

He didn’t hang up on me, but I know he wanted to.

Ultimately, we have power over what we read. We can choose to spend our day reading content that inspires and informs us or waste it on blogs we don’t enjoy.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers I love and bloggers into whose target demographic I don’t fit. It doesn’t mean they suck, it just means they’re not for me. So I don’t read them. Simple, right?

“Dude, just stop reading her blog.”

But he couldn’t.

Dear Emily Post Institute,

I’m greatly enjoying your latest edition of Etiquette and thank you for the time you have put into making available an updated version of such a helpful guide. I must admit, however, that I find the chapter on electronic communication a little lacking. Seeing as most of our interaction in this day and age occurs on the web, I strongly recommend future editions give more space to this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
AV Flox

In August, Wired ran a story about internet fame featuring Julia Allison. The article, which was part of Wired’s How-To issue, gave tips for aspiring fameballs: seek photo ops with high-profile people, dress to draw attention, keep your readers guessing, let your minions fight your battles, and be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

It was a fun, light-hearted piece. Most readers hated it.

“Wired is supposed to be a legitimate source for all things technology,” wrote a reader identifying himself as Tomcore, “and helping further propagate a wannabe-celebutant—clarification—wannabe ROFLcon celebutant like Julie [sic] Allison, discredits the source. Don’t waste your time or ours doing reporting on insignificant attention hungry parasites. They’re everywhere and hardly worthy a Wired cover. Or at least if you do—make it someone entertaining—like the Starwars Kid.”

The rest of the web wasn’t far behind. At Valleywag, where Melissa Gira Grant had written a piece on the subject, a commenter whined, “I just cancelled my Wired subscription because of this Julia crap. I’m sorry but she is not a geek, not news worthy, not VC funding worthy. She is a high maintanence [sic] attention whore making a mockery of the industry. There are so many women they could have put on that cover that are intelligent geeks but instead they chose her. It is completely wrong and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for falling for her bullshit.”

At Gawker, the blog that’d made her famous, commenters were busy discussing how badly Photoshopped her legs looked. And on this month’s Wired, a reader graced the Rants section with the following jab, “She’s not worth the pixels she demands on our screens, and if I could find a way to blame her for the current mortgage crisis, I would.”

Last week Atherton published a piece featuring the ten most charming and often overlooked places in Hawaii. The piece, which was a final tribute to his time on the islands, took him days. He was so excited, he actually IMd me a link as soon as he wrapped up.

Not even a day later, an anonymous commenter hit his blog: “I find it interesting that on this list of must-dos almost none of the photographs are yours… surely in ten years you’ve actually ‘done’ these places at least once, enough to snap a pic or at least give us something more personal about your recommendation. Fairly or not, this leads one to believe that your recommendations are based not from personal experience but rather a spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites.”

While we build better blogs with criticism than we do with fawning praise, I’m disappointed that someone would take the time to reply to a carefully put-together blog post simply to scold the writer for not using his own images, insinuate he has never visited any of the specified locations, and attack him for being “deliberately obscure”—isn’t the whole point of the post to bring to light the lesser known wonders of the islands?

I don’t disagree that seeing these places through the blogger’s eyes would have been more interesting, however unprofessional or blurry the picture. A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.”

There’s an immense difference between helpful critique and hurtful criticism. Critique may not always be easy to take, but those offering it do it with the objective of helping those whose content they enjoy to develop even better content. We do it with firm words but never lose sight of the effort the creators of the content have put forth.

“When you’re a victim of a personal attack online, the first thing to remember is this: It’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there on the web, but it’s supremely easy to critique or mock others who do,” wrote Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani a couple of years ago.

Her comments are something that will always stay with me because of how simple and true they are. It’s not easy to put your thoughts and experience out into the world, especially in a culture that believes that they have the right to destroy everything that isn’t hidden or somehow protected.

“Would you graffiti a car in the street just because it wasn’t parked inside a garage?” I asked a friend once.

“That analogy doesn’t even make sense,” she responded. “The car belongs to someone.”

“So do the words used to represent the thoughts this person is expressing. So does that blog. The internet is a space and a post is a person’s property. And by leaving a vicious and useless anonymous comment, you’re vandalizing it.”

She didn’t respond.

“The web is crawling with overcaffeinated surfers who have been staring at a glowing box for hours—not the ideal environment for human interaction,” Trapani explained in her Lifehacker piece. “It’s easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don’t quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are ‘small’ and ‘weak.’”

“I’m really glad it happened,” Atherton told me the following day over coffee. “It’s helped me appreciate Julia Allison on a whole other level.”

Just then an e-mail tumbled into my inbox directly from my blog’s contact page: “Your piece about Philip Noble [sic] is insulting. First Nick Douglas and now this? You’re a male apologist and a cheap male-pleaser and you need to have your va-jay-jay card revoked.”

The e-mail address the commenter had included is telling “not@telling.com”. If a commenter can’t even include a working e-mail address or URL, he is a coward who lacks the courage of his convictions and isn’t worth another thought.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s OK to disagree with people, but always ask yourself if you have something to bring to the table. Personal attacks and assumptions about the people who have expressed their views before you are not valid arguments for anything. If you’re so enraged by what you read that you can’t function, then don’t try! Offending others will not make them more likely to listen to you. In fact, it often has the exact opposite effect.

It’s not that difficult to present an opposing viewpoint in a constructive way. Just follow the rule of the Cs: be civil, clear, concise and constructive. Build, don’t break.

I can’t imagine anyone calling me a misogynist to my face, and neither can I see anyone walking up to Egan and calling her an insecure slut.

In a web 2.0 world, I think we need to change the old saying, “if you can’t say something nice” to “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, then don’t say anything at all.”

If you still can’t play nice, then, to quote Egan, “FAQ you.”

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“Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them?” asks Jason Calacanis in his first e-mail after retiring from blogging.

“Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that ‘open is better!’ Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say ‘F-you’ to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness for you… how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.”

Calacanis is done with blogging. He’s now limiting his interaction to 1,000 of his readers through a mailing list. His first e-mail, sent out on July 12, went over some of the reasons he chose to make the change from a public blog to the more one-to-one kind of exchange that occurs over e-mail: in short, people are assholes.

LET’S GO WITH THE DIGG MODEL AND LET THEM HAVE MOB RULE

Who doesn’t remember the Sarah Lacy interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at SXSWi in March? Before the keynote address was over my Twitter timeline was exploding with cruel and unusual remarks about the journalist. No one is arguing it was a genius interview, or even a decent one—it wasn’t. But it certainly didn’t warrant the response it received, either.

“Try doing what I do for a living,” Lacy told the antagonistic crowd toward the end of the interview, completely exasperated. And so the mob began to scream that she turn the microphone over. Angry, Lacy snapped, “Let’s go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule!”

And what about when blogger and former editor of Gawker, Emily Gould appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine? NYT.com had to temporarily lock the discussion because its moderators were overwhelmed by the number of comments—most of them negative, of course. But the comments were nothing compared to the kind of rage that tore across the blogosphere. Gould was lynched and quartered, web 2.0-style.

When Wired’s latest issue hit the newsstands with blogger and former Star dating columnist Julia Allison on the cover, Gawker titled a piece about it The Backhanded Art of the Unflattering Cover and closed the piece by saying, “More importantly: editors and contributors who perhaps have some doubt as to your value as a cover model may undermine the honor with unflattering photoshop work and coverlines.”

Commenters didn’t waste a second before jumping in: “How do you photoshop someone’s legs into such elongated, hideous oblivion?” and “I love JA’s shoes! Do they come in human sizes?” and “I’d be totally behind that Wired cover if she were on a toilet and there was a pregnancy test in her hand with a pentagram on the indicator.”

And what about the deletion scandal between BoingBoing and San Francisco Chronicle’s sex columnist and Fleshbot contributor Violet Blue? Late last month, Violet Blue noticed that the content that related to her or her work on BoingBoing had disappeared (LA Times Web Scout blog has the number of missing entries at around 72). BoingBoing offered no explanation for the removal of these posts until after the issue exploded in the public square.

When interviewed by LA Times, BoingBiong’s Xeni Jardin, who had edited the one post Violet Blue had written and who had made most of the mentions to the sex blogger in other BoingBoing posts said:

A year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me. Kooky, creepy Internet guys were posting all sorts of grotesque, sexually explicit stuff about me, and trying to find photos of my house and information of my family. Really gross stuff that frightened me. When you’re at the receiving end of that kind of attention, would you voluntarily go out with private information in something that just felt sensitive and felt like your private editorial prerogative?

The problem, of course, is that BoingBoing isn’t a personal blog. But this isn’t about what happened there. It’s about what happens to people online.

IT’S MY BLOG, I CAN BITCH IF I WANT TO

The internet makes us easy targets. But not without our help.

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog, according to BlogWorldExpo. While we know that content we’re putting online is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to overshare.

Most recently, my good friend Katerina received threats from her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and baby momma after the latter found her blog.

“She wants to get a restraining order to keep me away from her son because of the high sexual content of my blog,” Katerina told me.

“That’s patently ridiculous.” I responded. “If she hadn’t screwed herself by changing her name to something so absolutely generic maybe she could have tried to get you for defamation of character considering everything you’ve said about her. But paint you as a sexual predator? Please, just because she’s frigid and could never fuck her ex like you do!”

People are assholes take #1,342,209. No, not really. But that’s how many hits you get if you look up, “I hate you” on Google Blogs.

Who hasn’t ranted about an ex, an ex’s ex, a colleague, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a boss, a client, a neighbor, a friend, a foe, the government? A blog is a cache of personal stories and people who piss us off are a real part of life.

And so we blog. Usually, it’s reactionary. Something hurts us, we blog and we let it go. But every once in a while you have the case of someone who can’t let it go. Anger becomes vendetta and they begin to dedicate a significant part of their lives to the destruction of someone they once called a friend.

My friend Atherton Bartelby, a Honolulu-based graphic designer, was BFF with a sport commentatrix based in the East Coast whom we’ll call Jackie. I use the past tense because they no longer talk. In fact, they hate each other. What happened? She was flying him out to the mainland for a get together and he stood her up. He said it was work-related. She said he was too drunk to find the airport.

That was just the beginning. For months, Jackie aired all of Bartelby’s dirty laundry on her blog. I don’t know how much of it was true, but from his taxes to alleged medical conditions, it was all right there, just a Google search away.

It was so messy and shame-attack inducing, Bartelby almost quit blogging. He came back, but like a pariah run out of town, he was forced to start from scratch and set up camp at a completely different blogging platform.

PACK OF HATERS

“Behind every success is a pack of haters,” goes the Lil Beck song, but in the microfame game, success is not required. Behind every blog post and tweet and utter and comment is a pack of haters.

“Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it.” Calacanis wrote in his retirement blog post.

The haters wasted no time responding: “Great news! Twitter will be a much better and less trafficked site now!”, “You had a blog?”, “Wait, you weren’t retired?”

We developed the Gestalt effect as a survival mechanism to visually recognize the whole form of a predator in the wild from an incomplete collection of lines and shapes. Will we in time develop a new mechanism to somehow avoid the frequent acts of random violence that we experience online now?

I remember the first time someone tore me a new one in a comment, completely unprovoked. I don’t remember who it was or what they said, but I will never forget how I felt: it was somewhere between shame and panic. I couldn’t understand it—why would a stranger feel compelled to be so mean to me?

The answer is that they don’t need a reason. The second you put yourself online, you turn yourself into an target.

DON’T READ THE COMMENTS

“You really shouldn’t read the comments,” was the first piece of advice that Emily Gould received when she started working at Gawker, a snarky gossip and entertainment blog about the media.

She disobeyed. It’s hard not to.

“I once received ‘Go back to Toronto!’ as a comment on my shitty editing skills when I turned down a supposedly widely-published author—who also supposedly fucked Bukowski’s sloppy seconds, as if that’s a claim to writing fame!” Laura Roberts, editor of the literary smut magazine Black Heart Magazine tells me.

I can’t see anyone hating on the funny, bodacious Roberts. I begin asking everyone I know with an online presence whether they’ve received mean comments from strangers.

“Yeah,” journalist and former relationship columnist Matt Katz confirms. He’s been blogging for a year about his engagement. “It was from a Malawian living in England. He said, ‘you live in a country where men get shit on their penises and you defend it’ and whatnot. I deleted it.”

Digital girl and media maven Julia Roy linked me to a post on her blog about a troll she contracted via the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Across her timeline, Roy’s been a dick tease, a dumb bitch, a lying ass bitch, and a “hoe ass.” And, no, I don’t know what that is, either.

“You’ve received your share of nasty comments—what’s the worst?” I ask Emily Gould.

“Ha!” she replies. “Um, at this point it all kind of blurs together.”

THE INTERNET WON’T MAKE UP FOR WHAT HAPPENED IN HIGH SCHOOL

That’s what blogger Meg Fowler’s shirts over at Cafepress say. According to her, it’s a desire to compensate for loserdom experienced in high school that makes people mean online.

Everyone is shot back to the put someone down or be put down mentality that makes high school so brutal. Add anonymity to this equation and the potential for serious assholism is exponential.

“I’m not naive enough to think that anyone will ever wrangle all the assholes into submission and calm the Internet into a state of semi-grace,” says Fowler. But she’s put her two cents out there in an often-Digged post titled How Not To Be An Asshole Or Encourage Assholism On The Internet.

“At the end of the day, everyone will lose their temper now and again, and write something that embarrasses them. It’s just a matter of not making it a lifestyle choice,” she writes. “If you’ve been an asshole, apologize, and let it go. If the person ignores you, you did your part. You can’t make them love you, as Bonnie Raitt says.”

LIFE AFTER WEBSECUTION

“If I were going to completely disavow self-scrutiny and unedited opinion-broadcasting, it would mean the end of my life as a blogger,” wrote Gould in her piece on blogging for the New York Times Magazine. “I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004—there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.”

As of today, Gould has reinstated comments on her blog after two weeks without that function on her posts. Will her commenters reform and learn to play nice?

Will any of us learn to play nice?

Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and ex-husband to a woman who made a circus of the disintegration of their marriage online, said it best, “Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”

Let’s be more creative.

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